rasmuskleisnielsen.net

I arrived a bit late to the session, as Erik Brauner was opening it up to the audience with a question–“how can we improve your experience working with the data?”

Three main questions occupied most of the discussion, (1) the whether the new correlations in voting patters in ’08 implied causation or in other ways should be seen as probably long-term, stable trends (Latinos voting more Democratically, etc), (2) Catalist’s role as a repository for the kind of data that campaigns often gather, and then just throws away, and (3) where progressives stand vis-a-vis conservatives on data and tech.

(1) Brauner pointed out that Catalist are still in the process of breaking down their data on a media market level and campaign district level to better measure the impact of various initiatives. He slyly pointed out that many different players will always want to take credit for victories, and that data like Catalist’s can provide a reality-check on such claims.

(2) “For the good of the community, we view ourselves as a resevoir of all the data that campaigns generate and just throw away”. Clearly, there is much to be done here. For instance, if you want to move from registered voters to voting age population, most of Catalist’s data is from people’s commercial footprint, and when people move it is complicated and problematic to follow them. Brauner points out that there is a lot of room for improvement here, and that a lot of it has to do with channeling data that already exists and is gathered.

(3) On the progressive-vs-conservatives point, Brauner reminds the audience that one thing that conservatives still have in their favor is that they have been collecting this kind of data for years at a local level. Someone adds that things will become somewhat easier as there are now more sympathetic secretaries of state out there. Jim St. George from VAN argues that progressives have leapfrogged conservatives on the technology side, and are no longer behind.

OK, so various federal entities weren’t all that good at managing the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq.

And what’s more, they now officially know it, at least according to a 500+ page ‘federal history’, ‘Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience’, that has been leaked. Great, this is important.

Here is how the New York Times, who hosts the report linked to above, covered the story.

Interestingly enough, the report was leaked to ProPublica and the Times, here is ProPublica’s coverage.

This is good and important journalism (and largely fed by disgruntled federal employees).

I just want to note here that whereas ProPublica lists the institutional affiliation of both reporters, (by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica and James Glanz, The New York Times), the NYT does not list either (By JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER).

Reading the Times article, it is only on the second page that the story mentions ProPublica… Go figure.

I’ll be at RootsCamp in DC for the weekend, which I’m really looking forward to.

It means, however, that I will miss out on the house meetings over the future of the Obama movement-network. If anyone picks up on any goodies or have any stories to tell from them, I’m all ears.

FCC chairman Martin is not pinned down on anything illegal, but the report still paints a pretty grim picture of his reign. Looking forward to seeing who will replace him.

Check out this email exchange, where an aide to the chairman is pressuring a staffer to come to specific pre-ordained conclusions.

Read the whole report here. It looks big, but it’s actually only about 20 pages.

I somehow missed the ruckus round Pasadena Now last year. They have had the nerve to outsource some of their work to Indian journalists and producers, who according to the publisher, who was on BBC Newshour yesterday, are providing stories for $5-$7 a pop, whereas local journalists come at at least $30,000/year plus benefits. As a small independent businessman trying to make a profit off his site, he explained that he had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t afford to have all his journalists on staff anymore, and would now try to cut cost by doing more of the work off-shore, especially back-office stuff like production of videos and the like, and also some content production. Hardly a novel idea in business, but in journalism, oh boy (of course, Reuters and others have done this for years now, as Robert Niles points out).

The case gives a complicated twist to the whole ‘future of the media’ discussion, because it shows how the future of actual journalism in a community may not be as narrowly tied to the future of traditionally employed journalists in the community as one would think. The professional role of the journalist as we have inherited it includes a wide range of tasks, and only some of those are acts of on-the-ground reporting, including the building of a network of trusted sources–others include writing up, editing, a lot of work over the phone and based on press releases and videos, and, increasingly, new media production work to put stories including video and pictures up on websites. News as a the reader/user/consumer meets the product is, as Dave Cohen always points out, the outcome of a process.

Those who resist outsourcing and similar examples of commercial media enterprises catching up with practices that are by now commonplace in most of the private sector may inadvertently be taking the side of journalists versus the side of journalism that covers a given community. I don’t say this because I am a fan of people loosing their jobs due to outsourcing, but because I like the idea of all communities being served journalistically at least in some form. And the dominant model in the U.S. has, like it or not, for the last hundred years or so, been to leave newsgathering to private enterprise.

The BBC had found a grumpy old journalist to say the usual things about how Pasedana Now was fake journalism etc. Pasadena’s publisher counted with what I think was a pretty good, basic point, that as far as he was concerned, it was not a question of American workers vs. Indian workers, but of no workers and no site, or of Indian workers contributing to a Pasadena site. He still wants to maintain a presence on the ground, and agreed that community coverage is impossible without a journalistic presence in the community (it is unclear to me how many people doing on-the-ground reporting in the community we are talking about, does anybody know?), but also wanted to make a living. Fair point, really (does anyone out there now how profitable/not Pasadena Now is?).

Here is how Reuter’s explain it’s decision, made back in 2004, to run some of its Wall Street coverage out of a Banaglore bureau (from PBS/Mediashift)

“Back in 2004, media giant Reuters announced that it would be outsourcing Wall Street reporting work to a newly created bureau in Bangalore, India. At that time, Reuters Editor in Chief David Schlesinger assured the skeptical that these reporters would only be handling rudimentary tasks such as fact-checking and data filtering, leaving the real meat of the matter to American reporters. “Now we can send our New York journalists out to do more interesting stories,” he told the BBC last February. “This is good for our business and good for journalism.””

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, who wrote the PBS/MediaShift story on this, gives both pros and cons, but goes on to argue that “local news reporting from abroad is an area of journalism where outsourcing is least likely to work”. Sure, for some parts of the journalistic process, such as the actual on-the-ground reporting, but I don’t really see why post-production stuff can’t be done at night in India? Is it important that the multi-media producer is in the community covered?

Look at the site: Pasadena Now is an online site that provides local coverage, mostly consumer and community-oriented stuff, nothing special, about Pasadena, an affluent LA suburb. Do you need to live there to format the photo feature of the Christman Musical?

The city is home to two newspapers, the chain-owned Pasadena Star-News and the (chain-owned) alt weekly Pasadena Weekly. OK, Pasadena Now does not look like it is aiming for a Pullitzer for its investigative reporting, fearless muckracking, and so on, but nor are the others really. The site provides a modicum of publicity for community events, largely friendly covereage, probably to a large extend based on press releases and pre-packaged content, but hey, who knows, maybe they will break an uncomfortable story one day too (anybody know of any cases?) or in some other way move into watch-dog territory too.

I don’t see that it is less likely to do this that the two local newspapers, who seems at least equally dependent on local advertisers and elites for content and business, and may be even less embedded in the local community than Pasadena Now, which at least only serves Pasadena, and does not seem to fill its site with canned content from a chain (Pasadena Star-News top stories right now include an AP story about an arrest in Las Vegas and a poll about whether Illinois Gov. Blagojevich should resign. Pasadena Weekly has a cover story about President-Elect Obama). Are they all collectively dragging down the standard of what qualifies as ‘journalism’? If so, they are hardly ahead of the curve, and I’d rather have three competing stenographers for power and commerce competing in a community than have only one or two–even if one of them is only able to maintain the business model that sustains its journalism by firing some of its journalists, and doing more back-office work in India.

With their permission, I have posted here the syllabis discussed at the December 2 event I summarized below. Michael Schudson’s two proseminar syllabi are here and here. Helga Tawil-Souri’s MA core syllabus is here. Shannon Mattern already has her courses posted on her site here and here.

Micah Sifry is doing great work at TechPresident following how the Obama movement-network is being transformed, and transforming itself. His article is a must-read. There are some good comments on the site, and I have, in all modesty, chipped in myself too…

Other links

http://www.realitywindow.com/archives/2008/12/whats-happening-to-cts-obama-n.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97722217

http://progressiveresourcecatalog.org/index.php/Obama/ArticleAa

SSRC may own the blog, but they sure don’t own the conversation. See Chris Anderson’s comment on Calhoun’s opening question–since it is also awaiting moderation, he posted it here.

As said, SSRC President Craig Calhoun’s page hosts an interesting discussion about the future of the newspaper here.

I wrote a comment. It is still awaiting moderation. I wonder if that is because it is (a) not up to par, which is possible, it is is certainly less to the point than the others, (b) has something to do with name recognition, the other participants are all well-known academics, I think this is unlikely, (c) reflects how the SSRC has organized the pre-moderation of the comments they allow on their site.

Anyway, never was a patient man, since I bothered to write the thing, I have cut and pasted it below. I post it here partly out of impatience, partly because I am vain enough to want it up somewhere when I took time to write it, and partly because I think I make some worthwhile points, most notably that we need to ask ‘what newspaper’ when we discuss the future of ‘the newsppaer’–I personally am more worried about the average newspaper than the prestige national dailies, as my comments below suggest.

– – –

Calhoun quickly slided from the overall question, ‘what is the future of the newspaper?’, to the more particular question of what the future is for the national newspaper.

When discussing the future of both journalism and newspapers (or ‘the media’, for that matter), I think it is important to keep in mind just how stratified the profession and the organizational population is, from well-paid reporters and nationally known outlets to precarious freelancing and generic chain papers. Stratification is a fact not only globally, as Boyer points out, but also within a country like the US.

So I have a few thoughts about the future of the mid-sized American newspaper, the kind that serves a small metropolitan area, the kind that has a daily circulation of, say, 40,000, and will often be the only newspaper in a given location, and hence one of few organizations doing actual newsgathering. Such local monopolies have been phenomenally profitable in the past, and underwritten a lot of newsgathering, but clearly that is changing now as jobs are cut everywhere–and in contrast to major national and international events (Calhoun’s example of Mumbia springs to mind, surely, there is no shortage of journalists there right now, and won’t be at future events of that type–power law distributions of attention from both audiences and the industry will concentrate effort right there, just as political conventions and royal weddings will continue to draw hundreds or thousands of journalists writing essentially identical stories), it is exceedingly unclear to me who will cover the next misuse of power, case of corruption, or conflict of interest in a city like Bridgeport, CT. There, the last Mayor, Fabrizi, used cocaine while in office, and the Mayor before him, Ganim, is serving nine years for racketeering, bribery, extortion, mail fraud and tax evasion. What happens there if the Connecticut Post is reduced to an advertising sheet? The NY Times has been cutting down on its reporters in the region. A NPR affiliate does some reporting. A few political community blogs contributes a fair amount of actual newsgathering. But the alternatives to the ConnPost are few and far between.

The NY Times and a few other nationally known brands can probably transform themselves into the kinds of multi-platform brand management/news production companies that Boyer writes about, or branch out in the test preparation, continuing education, or what not. Others can pursue what Gitlin calls the ‘fragment-based’ strategy of magazines and many online sites, and appeal to a single, often geographically distributed, audience. These options do not seem to me to be open to the Connecticut Post. I like the Connecticut Post. I like the fact it is there. But I would never for a second want a cent of my 401(k) invested in it, because I think it is in a deeply precarious position.

So what can it do? Hope for the public subsidies that more and more are arguing for, even if the idea continues to be anathema for many American journalists? Hope for non-profits to step in (a shift in mentality from ‘profitable’ to ‘fundable’ news production)? Hope that the transformation of government institutions and the growth of independent oversight bodies that Schudson writes about will bring down the costs of reporting? Wait for an angle owner to materialize?

What can the paper itself do? I don’t know. The owner, MediaNews Group, seems hell-bent on cost-cutting and consolidation, but I have yet to see much in terms of new ideas from them. Or even a serious attempt to implement some of the ideas that have been floating around for the last decade or so. So, OK, blame the corporate bean counters, and blame technological change. Things were much better back in the day, at least for most journalists. But what about journalists themselves? Whether it comes to the adoption of new technologies or the pursuit of new forms of content-production, one sometimes gets the sense (from my own research on the adoption of new technologies in Danish newspapers, from the research pursued by others, and anecdotally from spending many of my waking hours with journalists, journalists-to-be, and their products) that journalists are their own worst enemies. At least some of them–it might be useful to distinguish broadly between ‘new’ and ‘old journalists’ the same way we talk about new and old media. The idea of an emphasis on the things that even these cash-strapped mid-sized local papers (indeed especially these) have monopoly on, namely local news, combined with a stronger development of their community side (from ‘the’ newspaper to ‘my’ newspaper) requires taking seriously user-generated content, involvement with local community events, etc—and thus either an expanded journalistic professional self-understanding, that embraces the idea that facilitation of discussion and community are valuable parts of what journalists do (as they have been historically), or a diversification of the workforce into professions trained to and willing to work with communities. This model should be able to sustain some sort of operation. It is not pursued. The front page of the Connecticut Post website today is filled with national news. Why? Who are they kidding? Why not just link? And print a few national stories in the print edition and get on with the job of covering Bridgeport and what they are up to in Hartford?

That model may lead to a scaled down operation relative to the heyday of the 1980s (at least in areas that still has a location-bound population and commercial life, but arguable, that continues to be the case for much of the country). Such local newspapers may cease being career destinations, and be more like incubators that no longer employ journalists for more than a few years (according to payscale.com, a journalists with 1-4 years of experience earns about $33k/year, whereas one with 5-9 years earns about $44k/year on average), but give them a chance to show what they can do, that they are ‘new journalists’, and function as stepping stones for people interested in pursuing a further career later either in more resource-rich media elsewhere, or perhaps a transition into various forms of communications jobs in their local community–think of the way political campaigning only is a life-long career for a very, very few of the many young, talented, and driven people who take it up at one point or other in their life, but still often ‘leads somewhere’, into non-profits, into government, etc.

There are hundreds of mid-sized local and regional newspapers like the Connecticut Post around the country, and a few may be saved by angels, but the rest, and especially the chain-owned ones and the ones dominated by a traditional form of journalistic self-undesrtanding, are likely to continue to cut and cut and cut while they wait for the elusive new business model, the subsidies they may not even really want, or the angels that there may be precious few of. When thinking about the future of the American newspapers, I like to make a provocative comparison to the future of monasteries in Europe, seen from the vantage point of, say 1600AD–the question at stake when the transformation set in was not the survival of ‘the monastery’, because some survived in recognizable form, even as others were transformed to educational institutions, eventually to resorts, and what not, but the dramatic contraction of the continent-wide institution of monasteries. That contraction seems to have been partly driven by precisely the kind of unsustainability of individual organizations that ‘the American newspaper’ as an institution face today, arguably exacerbated by ‘old journalists’ reluctant to embrace new technologies, new forms of funding (whether subsidies or non-profit), and new journalistic practices. I root for a generation of new journalists, and hope there will be jobs for them as they go out into the world. There will be newspapers in the future, probably even printed ones, and every country will, I think, continue to have a ‘paper of record’–but at the local level, they may be few and far between, unless change happens soon, and that scarcity will, I fear, be much more pronounced and pernicious at the local and regional level than at the national level.

A few notes from ‘European Journalism in the Era of Digital Information’, an event last night organized by the European Institute at Columbia University. Dominic C. Boyer (Cornell) is the speaker, Jane Kramer (The New Yorker) and Nick Lemann (Dean, Columbia School of Journalism) were the discussants.

Boyer has done field research and interviews with journalists in Europe, predominantly with the AP in Frankfurt, Germany, and speaks about the distinctive challenges facing European journalism, and the kinds of transformations happening there. He is working on a book on this, which I am really looking forward to.

Boyer started by pointing out that he does not think the changes he will speak about are unique to Europe. In so far as there is any European exceptionalism when it comes to media, it has to do with the public media versus private media balance being very different (esp. relative to for instance U.S). In Germany, for instance, this generates debates over what the role of public media should be online, where private media are lobbying for caps on how large parts of their budgets they should be allowed to spend on online media, arguing that their direct subsidies distort competition and unnecessarily crowds out commercial organizations.

He went on from here to share with us some observations from his interviews and field work on eight major issues and trends

(unless thinks are in quotation marks, I am paraphrasing, so these are my best attempts to convey what they said, I have probably missed a thousand nuances):

/ / / ONE / / /

Journalism is a profession in transition. Not necessarily in crisis, mind you, some see wonderful new opportunities too. The journalists point largely to new media driving this. But also fragmentation of national audiences and the acceleration of the news cycle with 24/7 cable news etc.

/ / / TWO / / /

Newspaper circulation continues to decline, and this is very present to the journalists. (RKN: he arguably means paid newspaper circulation; the free metro dailies have added many, many thousand new readers to the overall newspaper audience). DB also points out that in a global perspective; newspaper circulation is up, because it is increasing in many poor countries.

/ / / THREE / / /

The traditional revenue models behind journalism are in crisis, especially for print journalism, which also suffers from the perception in the investor community that they are in a more or less irreversibly long-term decline, and that investors therefore has to squeeze as much money out of it now as they can (typical strategy with so-called ‘sunset industries’). DB argues, by the way, that this latter idea is at least partially incorrect, and points to the high profit margins of many newspapers and newspaper chains (more on this below).

/ / / FOUR / / /

Journalists experience these years as a time of downsizing and de-professionalization. Many organizations experience an influx of younger writers, of part-timers, of interns, of freelancers. This in turn generates new labor-management relations, changed role for unions, and a tiered system where some people have very good benefits job security, etc, whereas most do not.

/ / / FIVE / / /

A striking experience many German journalists told him about is that they experience a fragmentation of ‘the public’ in the singular as the addressee of their work (RKN: I was surprised to hear that the journalists he studied thought like this, as Germany, like many other European countries, also has a strong historical strand of opinion and partisan journalism, which is addressed not to the public but to a certain position, but this may reflect the deep impact of the deliberate attempt to export an American model of journalism to Germany after the war). The basic transformation the journalists report is one of going from speaking to ‘the public’ to speaking to particular desirable demographics, audience segments, consumer groups, etc (RKN: again, a historical note, they may always have been doing that, but now, they are instructed to do it). This in turn casts doubt on the public interest discourse often invoked to legitimize journalism, where the profession and its institutions are purported to represent the general public interest versus parochial politicians and pernicious special interests.

/ / / SIX / / /

The journalists reported increasing difficulties arising from having to manage information in real-time. He had lots of examples of frustration with time pressures, updates of stories etc, and said that many reporters had told him it was a strange feeling when news monitors with 24/7 news started appearing everywhere in newsrooms.

/ / / SEVEN / / /

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many spoke of difficulties maintaining journalistic standards under increasing production pressures. DB pointed out that this often led journalists under stress and pressure to turn to ‘authoritative’ high-status print publications like Spiegel to see “what the real story is”, and that this in turn further fed group thinking, pack mentality and all of that.

/ / / EIGHT / / /

Finally, DB pointed out that many journalists had pointed to what they perceived as an increasing self-referentiality in media coverage, whereas foreign affairs might still be event driven, something happens, it is covered, the domestic coverage was often seen as driven by media events and their reverberations throughout the national media environment.

/ / / Some synthesizing remarks and discussion / / /

DB concluded by saying that the portrait of the state of journalism that arise from his empirical work in Germany is a long way from traditional ideals, whether academic/theoretical or journalistic, of the profession as opinion-builders, truth-finders, watch dogs and whatnot.

In his response, Nick Lemann (NL) pointed out that companies rarely break the numbers down, but that “on the rumor mill”, all the big papers in the U.S. are said to be operating at a loss. So the old meme that ‘the problem is that owners demand unreasonable profit’ is losing its relevance.

He went on to point out, speaking about the US, that the vast majority of the reportorial workforce continues to work for newspapers, and that the historical coincidence that made local newspapers local information monopolies, funded by downtown department stores, is disappearing as (a) the funding side is disintegrating due to demographic and urban changes, (b) advertising in general is hitting a rough spot right now, and also shifting towards various web services, (c) the barriers to entry for information providers are lowered for all online, (d) which has led to increased competition for many kinds of content (international and national coverage, fashion, what not), and that this perfect storm has seriously undermined news organizations’ ability and will to underwrite original reporting.

He pointed out that this development in his view has been exacerbated by the “catastrophic decision” in the 1990s “to give content away for free”. He said that the thinking then was that this way, news organizations could grow their audiences to such sizes that increased ad revenue would cover the decreased income—unfortunately, these ad dollars have not materialized.

He called basic reportorial work, predominantly done by newspaper journalists, “a rock” upon which much, much else rests, not only a lot of the opinion and commentary material generated on blogs, but also much of TV and radio. All supported by the reportorial work done by a handful of people.

And few alternatives seems to be forthcoming. The belief in citizen media and citizen journalisms’ ability to step in and fill the growing gap has eroded, especially at the state and local level where bureaus are being cut dramatically, and where there will often be no one but the local newspaper covering issues.

So what do we do? That is the final question NL asked, and he said that anyone he had a concrete idea for a new business model was welcome to try it out, but that he wanted to see stuff that worked, and that there hadn’t been much in the offering yet. He said that the news industry and journalism in the US “need to go European”, and think about funding models beyond traditional business, potentially involving forms of public subsidy, even state subsidy of reporting, regulations, and the like (RKN: tools that have, as Paul Starr has pointed out in his excellent The Creation of the Media, been integral to the development of the media in the US historically, been seems to be out of vogue at the moment).

I asked DB at the end if he would agree that his synthetic view and 8 observations mainly applied to the corner of journalism that covers high-prestige organizations with highly professionalized staff, and that institutions with (a) less prestige and different audiences, and/or (b) a less traditionally professionalized workforce, like many tabloids, local papers, ethnic papers, and most new media enterprises, would see the situation of “European Journalism in the Era of Digital Information” quite differently, and he seemed to agree.

I also asked about why he thought it was the case that the new media and citizen media discussions and practices in Europe seems to be less developed than in the US. I didn’t really catch his answer, but it had partly to do with an idea that there are other, non-media institutions playing comparable roles in European societies, basically, public meetings standing in for blogs (I’m surely misrepresenting his full answer here). I have not thought this through, but I personally think it also has a lot to do with critical mass—coming from a small country myself, I always find myself thinking, faced with a specialized new media venture ‘would this be possible with a population of 5 million?’ Some would arguably, others probably not.

EVENT DETAILS

Thursday, December 4, 2008
Seminar on Modern Europe: European Journalism in the Era of Digital Information
Speaker: Dominic C. Boyer, Cornell University

Discussants: Jane Kramer, The New Yorker

Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Chair: Nancy W. Collins, Columbia University
December 4, 4:00 – 5:30 pm, Burden Room, Low Library
For more information, please contact Myrisha S. Lewis, msl2155@columbia.edu